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On age and time pressure in domain games. Or: the OSR Lurgie Table

Getting old kind of sucks and life’s most annoying way to let you know you’re getting old is to make your body fall apart. Age in D&D traditionally means falling stats. Stats falling with time gives players a sense of urgency, especially during domain play. It’s fine to spend a few years breeding horses, raising kids, researching spells and skill at arms and blogging, except when you’re not happy about time passing.

Every winter after the 1d6+30th each PC follows the following steps:

Roll on the Lurgie table. The stat in the second column drops by one permanently because of the condition in the third column.

Roll a d6:

On a 4 or more, get back to step 1. I know, it sucks, but the alternative to age is an early death.

On a 3 or less, you’re happy with not getting even worse.

Roll two dice:

If the result is equal or over your Physique or Constitution or 12, you get the serious lurgie: roll again on the Lurgie table to find which one. That stat takes 1d6 damage, but you recover 1 point per month. A medic can roll on medicine to halve the damage (round up).

if the result is under your Physique or Constitution, you’ll probably see the next spring unless you starve or the orcs/them foreigners get you.

If at any point any of your stats is 2 or less, you’re bedridden. At 0 you’re DEAD. If your hits get to 0, you’re bedridden, under 0 you’re DEAD.

This is the Lurgie table for AFG.

1d6

stat affected

condition

1

physique

consumption/stroke

2

craft

drink/senility

3

spirit

evil eye/nerves

4

take 1 negative additional hit

palsy/tremors

5MORE

NO LOSS

you’re fine!

And this is the Lurgie table for D&D and other OSR games. In these games the stat loss is secure instead of having a 50% chance because it has twice as many stats compared to AFG. There’s no direct hit point loss but a drop in Constitution will lower your HP.